"Your college career was uglier than Brad Lidge in the 9th inning—at least as of late—but congratulations, you made it to the NBA.

Your shot was useless from both the perimeter and around the basket, and you didn’t have the lateral movement to defend anyone—not even my dad scrimmaging in a bagels-and-basketball Sunday league." --Jason Strasser in regards to the recent signing of Shavlik Randolph by the Philadelphia 76ers

President Bush nominated Harriet Ellan Miers, his White House counsel and former personal attorney, to the Supreme Court yesterday, choosing a woman who broke barriers in the male-dominated Texas legal world but brings no judicial experience or constitutional background to her new assignment. read more

if you had an opportunity to appoint someone to the highest court in the land (it's a lifetime appointment, mind you), would you nominate someone who's never been a judge at any level? I'm sure she's an excellent lawyer, well schooled in the nation's laws and policies, but really, was there no one with a similar resume that had actual experience that could have gotten the call first?

Bush described Miers, who if confirmed would be the third woman to sit on the Supreme Court, as a legal pioneer who repeatedly overcame gender barriers to reach the highest levels of her profession. Before being named White House counsel last year, she served as White House deputy chief of staff as well as staff secretary, a job in which she reviewed virtually every document that went before the president.

Before joining the Bush administration, Miers was Bush's personal attorney in Texas and served as general counsel of his gubernatorial campaign committee. As governor, Bush appointed Miers chairman of the scandal-plagued Texas Lottery Commission, where she earned a reputation as a tough manager after firing two executive directors.

Outside her political work for Bush, Miers was a partner at the Texas law firm of Locke Liddell & Sapp, served two years on the Dallas City Council and was the first woman to be head of the Texas Bar Association. washington post article

seems to me that it's been some time since she's even worked as a lawyer. it will be interesting to see how this plays out...

well, the sox certainly didn't start out so well. let's just hope history repeats itself and papi and the boys pull out another string of clutch performances so we can at least make it back to the alcs.

For the third straight year (and the first time in club history) the Boston Red Sox have qualified for postseason play. Sure it's via the controversial wildcard, but hey, the past 3 World Series Champs have been wildcard winners. As division winners, on Tuesday the Yanks get to face the Angels (in Anaheim, mind you), who finished the season on a 14-2 tear, while the wildcard game features a Chi-town matchup between the Sox -- Red vs. White. While losing the 4 game lead we had with only 21 to play hurt, we'll take this matchup any day. This is a White Sox team that nearly made history by putting together the biggest collapse in mlb history. Yeah, we'll take that.

After a lovely weekend spent with some college friends, I arrived home to find out that Fantasia Barrino has revealed that she's illiterate. Call me cruel, but I really don't have any sympathy for the American Idol star. Don't get me wrong, no victim should be blamed for their rape, and I understand how that could drive someone to drop out of school, but she was in the ninth grade at the time. That means she successfully made it through the eighth grade. I don't know about you, but in my school, we may not have always understood the deeper meaning behind some of the classic novels, but we were certainly capable of reading and extracting some sort of take home message from the products of authors such as Shakespeare, Dickens, and Richard Adams (Watership Down, anybody?). Granted, I had the opportunity to attend a school with more educational opportunities than the average american student, but a bit of cursory digging seems to support my conclusion. I applaud her for taking care of business now, but it's still ridiculous that she was ever in the position in the first place.

The 21-year-old R&B singer says she's signed record deals and contracts that she didn't read and couldn't understand. But the hardest part, she said, is not being able to read to Zion, her 4-year-old daughter. read more

My guess is that this has been exaggerated for the sake of the story but it's still a travesty.